how to be more eco friendly on vacation

I recently returned from a trip to Disney World and it was such a fun time. Just being able to get away from work, regular life, as well as a snowfall at home was very needed.

As I have talked about on my blog before I am trying to work on switching out items in my life to become more eco friendly and use less single use products. I didn’t want all of my hard work to go to waste when I was on vacation so I made a conscious effort to bring some items and vacation in such a way that I was producing less waste.

Now I will preface this by saying that I was in no way perfect and there were definitely items that I had to throw away (sometimes we needed vegetables really badly and bought small plastic containers of carrots because we were feeling the lack of fresh food.

Disney World is also not the most eco-friendly location and most of the food that you get at quick service locations are served on disposable dishes and there is no way to avoid that. We did try our best however and here were some of the ways that we avoided trash on vacation, whether you are at Disney or somewhere else.

real cutlery, but plastic cup

fresh beignets – no plastic involved!

Water Bottle! The two of us both don’t get pop or other drinks like that that often so we opted to bring a water bottle with us. We were able to fill it up all over the place and we were always able to stay hydrated. We heard the water wasn’t the best tasting in Florida so I brought one of those water flavourers but we didn’t mind the taste and never used them. We did get drinks in plastic a few times as we wanted to try a drink from every country in EPCOT but the rest of what we drank was entirely water.

Straws – As we pretty much only used water these weren’t used often but I still had them packed away for times that we did need them. We did get a drink with a straw in Animal Kingdom but they don’t use plastic straws in that park so we used the really nice paper straws that they had.

Cutlery – This was probably the best thing that I packed out of everything. I had two small sets of metal cutlery and was never stopped by security for them. We used them for every single meal that we had and we were able to only have a plastic utensil once and that was because they placed it in the food before they gave it to us.

Backpack – I carried all of these things inside of a small backpack over all of the parks. It was a great size and was able to even hold a pair of pants for Nigel on a day when we had a fancy dinner in the evening. The bag was also able to hold any souvenirs or snacks as well so we avoided plastic bags for anything we did buy.

Not buying tons of souvenirs – Neither Nigel or I are big stuff people, in fact many people know that we are quite minimalist. We are also not big on many of the types of stuff that are sold in the park. We ended up buying three things. I got one sweater that I really loved and I don’t have any sweaters at home and we got two Christmas ornaments which is our preferred souvenir from any vacation. We made sure to not pick up any of the trinkets that were cute but we knew we would never use once we got home.

Using public transportation – There was one day when we went off site to travel to NASA and we had to rent a car for that day, but for the rest of the time we relied on the Disney provided transportation, taking buses, boats, and monorails to get to our destinations. Many people drove their cars to the parks every day, but we didn’t need to when there were such great ways to get their in a more eco friendly manner.

cute picture of us, featuring my new sweater

Those were some of the ways that I tried to reduce my waste on my Disney World vacation. How do you reduce your waste while traveling?

Fabulous post! I have just returned from Disney and they really aren’t doing much to help with the plastic situation which is surprising really given they are all about conservation. Sadly I didn’t have the foresight you did but I will next time I go. I’ve just started to look more into being eco friendly… I’ve done the basics but you can always do more. Thanks for sharing 😊